Selected abstracts from the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, July 1993.
The most recent payoff schedule, not the reinforcer or sense modality, decides which part of a compound cue controls behavior.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Scientists trained rats to press a lever for food. A tone and a light always came on together.
Later they changed the rules. Sometimes only the tone mattered. Sometimes only the light mattered.
They watched which part of the pair the rat kept following.
What they found
The last schedule, not the food type, picked the winner. If tone presses had just paid off, the tone won control. If light presses had just paid off, the light won.
The rat ignored which sense was “nicer.” It simply read the newest deal.
How this fits with other research
Decasper et al. (1977) saw the same thing with pigeons. Birds followed the part of a tone-color pair that had lately paid. The 1994 rat study repeats the rule in a new species.
Duker et al. (1996) looked almost opposite. They found visual cues give stronger “behavioral momentum” than sound. This seems to clash, but they tested Pavlovian pairings, not the latest lever deal. Different procedure, different story.
KELLEHEBERRYMAELLIOTT et al. (1962) review explains why: any cue tied to food can become a reinforcer. Once it has that power, fresh contingencies can flip which cue matters most.
Why it matters
Your client may have a “compound cue” like tablet plus spoken prompt. If you shift which part earns tokens, the child will track the newest rule, not the flashiest sense. Update the contingency, not the toy, to move stimulus control where you want it.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Rats were trained to press a lever in the presence of a tone-light compound stimulus and not to press in its absence. In each of two experiments, schedules were designed to make the compound a conditioned punisher for one group and a conditioned reinforcer for the other. In Experiment 1, one group's responding produced food in the presence of the compound but not in its absence. The other group's responding terminated the compound stimulus, and food was presented only in its absence. When tone and light were later presented separately, light controlled more responding than did tone in the former group, but tone gained substantial control in the latter. The same effects were also observed within subjects when the training schedules were switched over groups. In Experiment 2, two groups avoided shock in the presence of the compound stimulus. In the absence of the compound, one group was not shocked, and the other received both response-independent and response-produced shock. When tone and light were presented separately, the former group's responding was mainly controlled by tone, but the latter group's responding was almost exclusively controlled by light. These effects were also observed within subjects when the training schedules were switched over groups. Thus, these single-incentive selective association effects (appetitive in Experiment 1 and aversive in Exper- iment 2) were completely reversible. The schedules in which the compound should have been a conditioned reinforcer consistently produced visual control, and auditory control increased when the compound should have become a conditioned punisher. Currently accepted accounts of selective associations based on affinities between shock and auditory stimuli and between food and visual stimuli (i.e., stimulus-reinforcer interactions) do not adequately address these results. The contingencies of reinforcement most recently associated with the compound and with its absence, rather than the nature of the reinforcer, determined whether auditory or visual stimulus control developed.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1994 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1994.27-181